Today's enterprises regularly produce large files. These files need to be managed in accordance with various company policies and processes. In a highly collaborative industry, how to ensure the secure and timely exchange and/or sharing of large amounts of data around the world can be a very difficult challenge.
For example, using emails to exchange data as attachments thereto may seem to be a convenient solution. However, the default attachment size for most widely used corporate email servers is 10 MB. Even if the attachment size can be increased, a large file attachment (e.g., 10 MB or more) can slow down the speed of an email delivery, or even cause a timeout error. Furthermore, emails are prone to security attacks such as network snooping and lack adequate tracking/control of email traffic such as forwarding, making emails not an ideal solution.
Another solution involves using the file transfer protocol (FTP) to transfer large files such as 2 GB to 50 GB. However, FTP is insecure—usernames, passwords, and files are sent over FTP connections in plain text, making it susceptible to hacking. Additionally, it can be difficult to set up in an enterprise environment as it involves negotiating with enterprise firewalls and filtering active FTP connections on local client machines. Furthermore, the speed of delivery is not sufficient to meet the demands of today's enterprises as it may take six to eight hours to send a 20 GB file over a FTP connection.
In view of the drawbacks in existing solutions, there is room for innovations and improvements in the field of managed file transfer.